Conventional capacitive touch panels come in two types: surface capacitive touch panels and projective capacitive touch panels.
A conventional surface capacitive touch panel operates in a manner described below. An induced current is produced as a result of a capacitive change arising from the capacitive coupling which happens as soon as a user's fingertip comes into contact with the touch panel. Then, the induced current exits electrodes disposed at the four corners of the touch panel, respectively. Afterward, the current strength at the four corners of the touch panel are compared with a controller to thereby calculate touch position coordinates. However, due to their structural limits, the conventional surface touch panels are restricted to single touch as opposed to multi-touch; as a result, the conventional surface touch panels are incapable of identifying two or more touch positions concurrently, thereby putting a limit on the application of the conventional surface touch panels.
On the contrary, the conventional projective capacitive touch panels attain multi-touch with interlaced arrays formed from multiple ITO layers. However, the conventional projective capacitive touch panels are each characterized by a multilayer structure in order to effectuate multi-touch; as a result, the conventional projective capacitive touch panels incur higher manufacturing costs than the conventional surface capacitive touch panels.